Today I started jury duty. My group is still in the selection process, so I don't know if I'll be chosen, but I go back Monday to find out. If I do become a juror, they say the trials usually last 5 to 7 days. I'll try to keep the blog on track, but even this one is several days late. Man, I used to crank out 300 or more every year. How the heck did I manage that? Well anyhow....
I was initially gonna write about bad guys, but I've had so much fun the past few days (before jury), writing about the early months of 1987, that I'll save the bad guys for another time. Or at least I'll try to. One thing about bad guys: they want to feel needed. They see life as a stage play, and they want to be included in the show. They believe that life, in order to be interesting, must have dramatic conflict. In Greek drama, of course, there are the 12 kinds of possible human conflict. Remember that course from 8th grade English? Did you have Mrs. Fields at Holmes Jr. High? She taught us the 12 types of dramatic conflict. There was Man Against Man, Man Against Nature, Man Against Himself....you can look 'em up. I don't remember all the archetypes right now, but the point is that the Greeks, or at least the Dramatic Greeks - the ones who wrote plays - thought that you needed conflict for drama, to make the play interesting, and they identified twelve types, and they made it a standard to include conflict in every play, even the comedies. In theory, then, you had to have something to produce that conflict, or the play would not be interesting. You needed a bad guy, or so it was thought, and the Greeks may well have been right. And the bad guy could even have been the weather, or an earthquake, i.e. Man Against Nature. But usually, the bad guy was a human being, because everyone could relate to that. Everyone has known a human bad guy, and who wants to watch a play where the actors just sit there picking flowers, right? And talking about how wonderful life is. That might not make an interesting play, any more than Andy Warhol's movie of Eight Hours Of A Skyscraper is an interesting movie. What was the box office on that flick? Zero dollars? Or maybe Andy was making a point, that you don't need conflict for a movie.
I think maybe you do, at least for movies and plays, and it doesn't have to be violent conflict. It can be farcical or what-have-you. It could be something to do with the family dog. But that's for movies and plays. You have to have a plot to make them entertaining, or no one will watch.
But what about life? Do you need to have conflict in life, to make it interesting, so that people will watch? I mean, some people do see life as a spectator sport, in which you cheer the good guys and jeer the bad guys, or vice versa. Some folks cheer the bad guys, and even go so far as to mock the good guys. The late and not-as-great-as-he-used-to-be Dave Small wrote poetry, and in one of his poems he wrote a line, a part of which I have never forgotten: "Mocking the heavy burdened." Mr. D nailed it with that line, regarding spiteful people who see life as a spectator sport, where all the world is in fact a stage, and the play is for their amusement.
But I say no to the trivialization of human emotion. Or worse, to the acceptance of actual, physical violence as the bad guy's right to act out what he sees as his role. And that's because I don't see life as a stage play. Whichever Shakespearean character said "all the world's a stage" was wrong, and Neil Peart was wrong to paraphrase him by saying: "All the world's a stage and we are merely players, performers and portrayers, each another's audience inside the gilded cage". Neil may have had another meaning in mind, regarding the fishbowl life of a rock star, but anyhow, what I am getting at is the tenet, false I believe, that you have to have Bad to know what Good is.
Is that a religious concept, or a philosophical one? Whichever, but I've heard people propose it; the idea that you can't know what Good is, unless you have something to compare it to, namely Bad. Or Evil. To know Good, you must have the counterweight of Evil. I think that's a gigantic bunch of baloney, and of course it is offered deliberately by the gigantic Bad Guy of the Universe, who also hopes you don't believe in him. And human bad guys don't believe in him....or do they? No one knows, but for sure they don't believe in God, because God scares them. And that's because God believes in our premise, that you don't need bad guys to make life interesting.
As for me, I don't think you need anything to compare Good to. A kiss is a kiss is a kiss. I don't need a punch in the nose to know that a kiss is good. You get the idea, but I'll bet it was a bad guy who first proposed that notion and got it rolling: "You have to have Bad to know Good".
And that's because the bottom line is that Bad Guys don't want to feel left out. They want to feel included and needed, because they do see life as a stage play, where everything is just ironic Play Acting, that we humans are all just playing our parts and that Good and Evil are just counterbalancing weights, and that nothing really matters, and we need an audience, and conflict, to make life interesting, and there won't be any consequences because it's all a stage play. It isn't real because it's all coming from the Id. The bad guy says, in essence, "I provide the conflict. What would you do without me? Your life would be pretty boring, right?"
And I say, "Yeah, but that's just for stage plays. In real life, we don't need bad guys." Have you ever seen a Squirrel Bad Guy, or a Dog Bad Guy? How about a Crow Bad Guy? No? And they get along okay regardless. I just saw a batch of squirrels today outside the Van Nuys Courthouse. They were running around, scurrying up and down trees, doing their Squirrel Thing. A guy came along and threw them some peanuts. Squirrels seem engaged whenever you see them, but you never see them fighting. So why do humans need bad guys?
The proverbial and perennial Bad Guy doesn't have an answer for that question, and seems depressed at the prospect that he isn't needed, and worse, that life is not a stage play after all.
And that's all I know for tonight. Tomorrow, I will look forward to working on 1987 again, the early months of which were plain fantastic. I love you, Lilly. ////
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